The Eurosystem has launched Pontes, which lets wholesale trades in tokenised assets settle against the central bank's own money. It went live on 21 September 2026 and is the first service to emerge from the Eurosystem's strategic programme for adapting central bank money to a tokenised market.
Tokenised markets have so far had to settle against commercial bank deposits or privately issued tokens, each of which carries the credit and liquidity risk of its issuer, and the resulting fragmentation of settlement standards has been one of the sector's persistent complaints. Pontes removes that substitution for wholesale activity inside the euro area by putting the central bank's own liability at the end of the transaction.
Christine Lagarde, president of the ECB, set the launch against the bloc's wider ambitions for its financial market.
"The Eurosystem is working to enable a more integrated, innovative and resilient European financial market in the digital age. We will continue to make progress in close collaboration with the market," by Christine Lagarde of the European Central Bank
Piero Cipollone, a member of the ECB's Executive Board, framed it in terms of what the launch unlocks for the market rather than what it replaces.
"Pontes brings the stability and trust of central bank money to the European tokenised finance ecosystem. It will give an important advantage to help it scale," by Piero Cipollone of the European Central Bank
What Pontes actually does
Tokenisation is shorthand for putting an asset, or a claim on one, onto a shared ledger in digital form. The appeal for wholesale markets is consolidation. An instrument's life is currently spread across a series of disconnected platforms: one to create it, another to trade it, others again to settle, hold and administer it. A shared ledger can hold all of that in one place, and smart contracts can run steps that today wait on a person, or on the stage before them. The same logic is behind the tokenisation venues regulators elsewhere have been authorising, including Coinbase's Abu Dhabi tokenisation hub.
Pontes connects that world to the existing one by providing the settlement leg in central bank money for transactions whose asset leg sits on a DLT network.
The design follows directly from the Eurosystem's 2024 tests using DLT for central bank money settlement.
A gradual rollout
Pontes goes live with a core set of services rather than a finished platform. What gets added, and when, is tied to what the market asks for and what the technology allows. The Eurosystem has said richer functionality and a longer daily operating window will arrive in stages, and that it expects the build to be complete by 2028.
Central banks elsewhere are testing the same question from the other direction, as in the MAS-led BLOOM initiative on always-on settlement. Operating hours, the range of supported services and the eventual connectivity model are the variables that determine whether a tokenised settlement workflow can be run in production or only in a pilot, and those variables are still moving.
Who has already connected
An initial group has completed onboarding and can use Pontes immediately. The market participants named by the ECB are ABANCA, BayernLB, Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations, Cecabank, Deutsche Bank, Deka Bank, DZ Bank, the European Investment Bank, Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau, Memo Bank, NRW.BANK, Santander and Société Générale. Germany's central bank, the Deutsche Bundesbank, is on the list too, signed up as a market participant rather than in its Eurosystem role.
Four market DLT operators have connected alongside them: Axiology, Cashlink, Clearstream and SWIAT. The Eurosystem says further participants are committed to connecting in the coming months.
The composition of that list is informative. It mixes large commercial banks with public promotional lenders such as the European Investment Bank, KfW, Caisse des Dépôts and NRW.BANK, and pairs them with established post-trade infrastructure in Clearstream. No crypto-native trading venue appears on it。
The wider programme
Pontes is one of two workstreams. The second is Appia. It is a joint effort: the Eurosystem and Danmarks Nationalbank are running trials and research with firms and public bodies, and what is due by 2028 is a blueprint rather than a live service. That is the same deadline the Eurosystem has set itself for finishing Pontes.
Further detail on both sits on the ECB's tokenisation and DLT pages.
Why it matters
Europe now has a public settlement rail for tokenised wholesale assets that is live, named and staffed with counterparties, rather than a consultation about one. For compliance and treasury teams at the institutions on that list, the practical questions move from whether central bank money will be available on-ledger to how settlement finality, operating windows and existing reporting obligations are handled when the asset leg lives on a DLT network and the cash leg sits with the Eurosystem.
For everyone else, the 2028 date is the one to diary. That is when the Eurosystem expects Pontes to be complete, and when the Appia blueprint is due to say what the surrounding ecosystem should look like.
